MEET THE MAKER: A BAKER ON THE RISE

At Nourish Kitchen and Bakery, Alissa Lees feels the pain of customers who can’t eat gluten. She’s on a mission to ensure they sacrifice neither flavour nor their health. by Shelley Boettcher

At Nourish Kitchen and Bakery, Alissa Lees feels the pain of customers who can’t eat gluten. She’s on a mission to ensure they sacrifice neither flavour nor their health.

alissa Lees was exhausted. She hadn’t been feeling well for ages, but despite tweaking her diet (more vegetables) and activities (more workouts) she wasn’t getting better. Her doctor ran some tests, and Lees was diagnosed with celiac disease. She had to stop eating all foods containing gluten—basically anything with wheat, barley or rye flour. No big deal, Lees thought, and as soon as she gave them up, her health began to improve. Then, one morning on her way to work, she thought she’d grab a coffee and something to eat, maybe a muffin, at the coffee shop near her gym. All of the baking, however, contained gluten. “But there were five or six other places on the way, so I thought I’d just stop in at the next one,” she recalls. “I stopped at every place, and there was nothing I could eat, except for a really sweet macaron.” She’d just finished a hard workout, and didn’t want to blow it all on sugary, empty calories, so she ate nothing, but she did hatch a plan. When she got home, she began to experiment, making wholesome, gluten-free treats. “Too much gluten-free bread tastes like cardboard. You toast it and it’s like warm cardboard,” she says. “I wanted to make something that I could eat, that actually tasted good.” Lees studied hotel and restaurant management at SAIT, and has worked at restaurants and hotels across Western Canada, including the Fairmont Banff Springs and Q Haute Cuisine. She soon realized she had the makings of a business on her hands. Last fall, she launched Nourish Kitchen and Bakery, with the help of her friend and partner, Kristin Arsenault. Nourish focuses on gluten-free baking, and everything it produces is also free of genetically modified ingredients and refined oils such as palm oil. Lees mills her own organic flour, and many ingredients are locally sourced and organic, too. While her main focus is gluten-free baking, she also has many items suitable for vegan and Paleo diets, too. Customers can buy her creations online (nourishkitchenandbakery.com) or at Outside the Shape in Inglewood, Liv Yoga + Wellness and Studio Revolution. She also periodically runs pop-up shops around the city; sign up on the website for details.

Lees knew she was on the right track when a little boy, maybe five years old, and his mom stopped by one of her pop-up shops. The boy’s mom asked if Lees had anything that was gluten-free. Her son was hungry, but like Lees, he has celiac disease. “Everything here is gluten-free,” Lees told the woman, pointing at the table laden with bread, cinnamon rolls, cookies and cupcakes.

What the mom said next isn’t exactly printable in a family magazine. Let’s just say she was shocked and thrilled at the thought of being able to eat anything on the table. Her son was, too. “I want everything,” the little boy told Lees, a giant smile on his face. As he happily munched away, the mom got teary. “Then was all teary-eyed,” Lees recalls. “These moments are small but special, and they’re really big to that kid and that mom.”

And to Lees, too. “I’m doing exactly what I want to do.”